How this site decides what to tell you

Sources

Every number here is calculated. Every reading here is tradition, and carries the name of the person who wrote it. Where the traditions contradict each other, this site prints the contradiction instead of choosing for you.

Calculated, and checkable

The phase and the illuminated fraction
The exact moment of every new Moon, first quarter, full Moon and last quarter
The sign the Moon is in, and the minute it crosses into the next
Moonrise and moonset for your city
The number and length of every lunar day
The tilt of the Moon as it is seen from your latitude

Tradition, and attributed

What a lunar day is said to mean
What the Moon in a sign is said to mean in a birth chart
The thirty symbols and the four satanic days
The eight lunation types in a birth chart
Any instruction to do or avoid something
Anything on this site written in the present tense about your life

astronomy-engine, an open source library, running in your browser

01What is calculated

Nothing on this site is stored, sent anywhere, or looked up from a table.

Every position is computed while the page is open, from the same ephemeris model that published almanacs use, and the results were checked against published tables to the minute. There is no account, no server holding your data, and no record of which city you looked at.

Positionsastronomy-engine, version 2.1An open source implementation of the standard planetary and lunar theory. MIT licence.
CitiesGeoNames, cities15000Coordinates and time zones for cities above one hundred and fifty thousand people, plus Israeli cities above forty thousand. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.
The Moon itselfNASA Scientific Visualization StudioThe CGI Moon Kit: a colour map from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera and an elevation map from its laser altimeter. Public domain.

The Moon you see is that real surface on a sphere, lit from the true angle of the Sun for the moment shown, and turned to the angle your own sky would show.

02The four author lines behind the lunar days

English pages about the lunar days almost always print one reading with no author at all. There is no single tradition to print. There are four lines, they are separable, and they disagree. This site names which one it is quoting every time.

AuthorWhat it isHow this site uses itRights

The lunary attributed to Albertus MagnusThe oldest layer A short verdict per day in four fixed slots: lucky or unlucky, what happens to the sick, whether dreams come true, and what the child born that day will be like. Quoted as the oldest reading, and flagged as pseudepigraphic. The attribution to Albertus, who died in 1280, is traditional and not proven, and the Russian text reads as much later chapbook prose. Out of copyright

Sergei Vronsky1915 to 1998 Classical Astrology, volume 4. The old lunary expanded into modern prose, in the same four slots and the same order. No symbols anywhere in his system. Quoted whenever he departs from Globa, which is often. Read against the Russian original rather than an English summary of it. In copyright, summarised in our own words

Pavel Globaborn 1953 The Avestan Lunar Calendar. The thirty symbols, the four satanic days, the stones, the foods and the omens. This is the layer that fills the English internet, usually uncredited. Quoted as the source of the symbols, and labelled as a twentieth century Russian arrangement rather than an ancient one. In copyright, summarised in our own words

Alexander Zaraevborn 1954 A different system altogether: no symbols in the texts that circulate, days pegged to the phase aspects, and nearly every day split into a favourable and an unfavourable half. Quoted as a fourth opinion. Where his own paid calendar is not public, this site says so instead of guessing. In copyright, summarised in our own words

A fifth column appears on some sites, borrowed from the Vedic tithis. It is a different calendar of fifteen units bolted onto a frame of thirty, and it repeats itself halfway down the list. This site does not use it.

Surviving manuscripts, not a claim about them

03What is genuinely old

The lunary is a real medieval European genre, and it is well attested.

One prognostic entry for each of the thirty days of the lunation, covering illness, bloodletting, travel, buying and selling, finding lost things, and the character of a child born that day. The Middle English verse text The Dayes of the Mone survives in the British Library, Harley 2320 and Harley 1735, from the fifteenth century. German lunar charts sit in Arundel 347 and in Additional 17987, dated 1446. Dozens of French lunaries are being edited now.

Note what those manuscripts do not contain: no animal or object symbol for each day, no satanic days, no gemstones and no fumigation recipes.

Named here because other sites present it as ancient

04What is twentieth century

The part everyone recognises is the newest part.

01The thirty symbolsNo trace of a lamp, leopard, bat and octopus sequence before the twentieth century.
02The four satanic daysNot in the medieval texts, and not the same thing as the dark days of Hecate, though English pages treat them as one.
03Stones and body parts per dayAssigning body parts to zodiac signs is medieval. Assigning them to lunar days is not.
04The health instructionsGastric lavage, enemas and astral slag are modern vocabulary, whatever the frame around them.

The Avestan claim belongs here too. Globa presents the set as ancient Zoroastrian; the Zoroastrian calendar is solar. His pages use real Persian names and mix them freely with Egyptian, Greek, Hindu, Slavic and Christian ones. The historian of religion Victor Schnirelmann describes the system as an esoteric mixture assembled in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and even sympathetic Russian sources say the term Avestan school of astrology was coined by Globa himself in the nineteen eighties.

A different set of sources, with a different copyright position

05The Moon in the signs

The sign readings rest on a book that anyone can check.

Alan LeoAstrology for All, 1899A full chapter on the Moon in each sign. Out of copyright everywhere, and the full text is on the Internet Archive, so you can read what we read.
Alice BaileyEsoteric Astrology, 1951The frame in which the Moon stands for the form and the past. Still in copyright, so short quotations only, always marked.
Dane RudhyarThe Lunation Cycle, 1967The eight phase types used on the birth page. In copyright, so the idea is summarised in our own words and never reproduced.

Named openly, because a gap is more useful than filler

06Where the sources are thin

Five of the thirty lunar days are poorly documented, and their pages say so.

On the fifth, two independent Russian sites print the fourth day's medieval text by mistake. The eighth is Globa's shortest entry, three sentences long. The tenth and the twenty fourth rest on Globa alone, because the older lines say almost nothing about them. The thirtieth is short everywhere, does not occur in every month, and Vronsky gives no verdict on it at all.

Those pages will stay short. Filling them would mean inventing, and inventing is the thing this site exists not to do.

The rules, in case a page ever breaks one

07What this site will not do

01Present a reading as a factTradition is labelled as tradition, in the same sentence, not in a disclaimer at the bottom.
02Hide a disagreementWhere the authors differ, all of them are printed, with names.
03Invent a citationEvery book named here was read, in the original language where that mattered.
04Give medical, legal or financial adviceNone of this is any of those, and none of it is a substitute for them.

If you find a claim on this site without a source beside it, that is a mistake and we would like to hear about it.